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Don’t Mention The War

It is wrong to suggest that people should be held accountable for the actions of their ancestors. Blaming each other for the deeds of our ancestors is the cause of vast tracts of human suffering and conflict. Tribes and nations have fought each others for centuries — and, in some places, continue to do so — based on the actions of that tribe or nation’s forefathers. This is irrational. We cannot change the actions of our ancestors. That is perhaps one reason why John Cleese’s portrayal of an idiot hotelier beating down his German guests with a spiel of cringe-inducing World War 2 and Nazi clichés is so absurdly funny.

That being said, we do have a responsibility to learn from and not repeat the mistakes of our ancestors. Failure to learn from the mistakes of one’s ancestors is the point at which the actions of past generations become relevant in a discussion of the present.

There is a line of reasoning that suggests that the first person to compare their opponent to Adolf Hitler or Nazism in an argument on the internet just lost the argument. I tend to see this view as generally correct. The acts and beliefs of the Nazis were unusually horrific, and comparing your opponent or the person or group you are criticizing to the Nazis is often an act of rhetorical desperation, and often a symptom of a lack of imagination. However, what is generally correct is often locally wrong. Sometimes, a Nazi or World War 2 analogy really cuts to the core of a problem.

This, I believe, is one of those times. Having the German government and its allies trying to dictate to the Greek people the terms of Greece’s euro membership, the standards by which they should run their government, and economy, and civil service, and welfare state must feel painfully close to a new German occupation. Greece is a country, we should not forget, that suffered greatly under a German military occupation less than a lifetime ago. It is now experiencing a brutal and prolonged economic depression at the hands of a new generation of austerity obsessed Germans.

Unfortunately, Merkel’s and the Troika’s medicine was a load of horse shit. Instead of recovering, the Greek economy just got even more depressed. Unemployment has been at Great Depression levels ever since Merkel and the Troika began dictating how the Greeks ran their economy. Greek real GDP continues to trend downward. Indeed, Europe itself remains in an epic depression. The austerians keep making it worse.

Now, nobody is saying that the Greeks are blameless. Obviously, they took on a load of relatively unproductive debt they couldn’t afford, and they colluded with financiers to falsify economic data to get into the eurozone. But the country has already suffered massively as a result of those decisions (which of course were not Greece’s alone — the creditors clearly did not do their homework).

The goal now should be getting Greece — and the wider continent and world, which would also suffer greatly from a default cascade or economic slump as a result of the Greek crisis — out of the mess they are in. What Greece really needs is debt forgiveness. Even the IMF recognizes that Greece’s debts are unrepayable. But that is not Merkel and Schaüble’s goal. Instead of recognizing that their policies have failed, and that a change in course is necessary, their goal for Greece is complete capitulation to the stormtroopers. Their goal for Greece is punishment, in order to set an example to other euro members who might get into fiscal trouble.

The great irony — and the thing that makes the Nazi references really begin to stick — is that earlier German governments received massive debt relief. Indeed, after Germany started the Second World War — which killed 50 million people, including 6 million who died in the holocaust — it had its war debt written off, allowing the West German economy to begin to recover and rebuild. Indeed, Germany was the biggest defaulter of the 20th century. Yet now the very descendants of those Germans refuse the same treatment for today’s Greeks, whose troubles pale against the crimes of Germany’s Nazi past.

This is sickening. Not only are they shredding to pieces the European unity and the European Union that has kept war-torn Europe at piece with itself for the past seventy years, they are doing it in the name of an ignorant program of austerity that does nothing other than punish and degrade. And they are doing it in complete ignorance of how their own ancestors benefited from others’ forgiveness. Do they not understand the value of European unity? Of economic growth? Of peace or prosperity?

In choosing the path of sadomasochism, punishment and German supremacism, Schaüble and Merkel and their allies are risking turning what is already a terrible depression for the continent — and a ravaging for Greece — into something deeper, gloomier and more painful.

10 thoughts on “Don’t Mention The War”

You are quite right, currencies are what?, 98% digital already. The problem with virtually every economist and pundit is they are not only ignorant of the true problems and solutions for modern economics, they are just as ignorant of money systems. And to top it off they are actually hypnotized by the idea of debt so they follow the financiers and Bankers blindly into the financiers’ and bankers’ dominating profit, the economy’s instability, periodic “unrepayable” debt, unnecessary human suffering and historically rhyming war as the stressed out “solution”. If it wasn’t so pitifully stupid and tragic….it would be funny.

Of course if they would simply momentarily stop splashing around on the surface of accounting trying to make sense out of the abstractions of debits and credits and look at the 3 and 4 dimensional datums of cost accounting they’d actually see the empirical evidence (this is what scientists allegedly do with the scientific method) . Then, seeings how those datums will reveal a trend in every ongoing enterprise, if they just did the calculus they’d be able to decipher the DYNAMIC realities of the economy and money system….and craft policies that actually addressed and solved the problems. But it takes an awakening from the spell of the idea of debt first.

As for the devaluation and instabilities of a new currency if you distributed actually sufficient amounts of it (as in more than the Banker’s normally like so as to befuddle everyone with austerity) and combined that with a policy of a retail discount that is totally rebated back to participating merchants and that is based on the formula of the total costs of what is consumed over the total costs of production (probably a 40-50% difference) …we could all happily advance toward the abundant, profit making and sane future that technology and AI is trying to enable us to do….if we would simply come into a new unit of time and out of the spell of the paradigm of Debt ONLY.

There can be no question that austerity will make things worse, if that is possible. There is also the possibility that. as usual, the bankers will make out like bandits, and the taxpayer will take it on the chin.

Very reminiscent of comments Thomas Piketty made this week, and absolutely correct. We have short memories and learn nothing. Austerity is a recipe for war; should the Germans remember their own history, they would know that.

“Today, in view of the common good, there is urgent need for politics and economics to enter into a frank dialogue in the service of life, especially human life. Saving banks at any cost, making the public pay the price, forgoing a firm commitment to reviewing and reforming the entire system, only reaffirms the absolute power of a financial system, a power which has no future and will only give rise to new crises after a slow, costly and only apparent recovery.”